Vernon drafts ban on mixed martial arts

City council is moving forward with the creation of a bylaw that would ban Mixed Martial Arts (MMA) events within municipal limits.

“We don’t need them,” Coun. Bob Spiers says. “It’s just the association with the type of people that run those events and the type of people that show up at those events. It might cause you a liability problem.”

The move comes on the heels of recent changes to how the province regulates and controls the sport.

“We’ve had discussions over the last couple of years from the police informing us that there’s a very strong historical and well known relationship between mixed martial arts events and organized crime,” Sawatzky says.

He says local government is mandated to protect peoples’ health, something not fostered in the sport of MMA.

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